Josh Constine

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a Senior Writer for TechCrunch.

Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, ads, ecommerce, games, and music technology.

Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master's degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.

Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes.

Josh Constine is an experienced public speaker, and has done on-stage inteviews with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, SoundCloud CEO Alex Ljung, and Senator Cory Booker. He's been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more, plus has been featured on television on NBC and Fox News. Constine is available for speaking gigs.

[Disclosures: Josh Constine advises a college friend's social location-sharing startup codenamed 'Signal' that is based in San Francisco. This advising role has been cleared with AOL and TechCrunch's editors. Constine's cousin Darren Lachtman is the founder of Niche, which connects social media stars to sponsorships from brands.]

Latest from Josh Constine

For the first time, children under 13 are allowed to have an official presence on Facebook. They still can’t have a profile, but their parents can now tag photos of them (or pet) to create a “Scrapbook”. This lets parents collect photos of their baby, toddler, or pre-teen in a centralized place they can share with friends or loved ones. Scrapbook will first roll out in the US… Read More

Giving away music is how you get people to pay for it. That might seem crazy, but its true, though Jay-Z doesn’t want to listen. He just launched a music streaming service called Tidal with Beyoncé, Daft Punk, Kanye, Arcade Fire, and Rihanna as co-owners contributing exclusive content. The goal is to get artists properly paid.
The problem is Tidal subscriptions costs $20 for… Read More

You don’t want to miss your favorite band’s concert in your town, even if you don’t care to see every one of their News Feed posts. To give you a hand and appeal to musicians by boosting their ticket sales, Facebook last night added an Events subscribe button to the Events section of all Pages on desktop and mobile. Once clicked, you’ll get a Facebook notification when… Read More

Phones can make us jerks. They let us ignore friends, cancel plans last-minute, and annoy those around us in public. But this month, we got a whole new way to abuse our mobile devices. Unless we can manage how we interrupt each other, it could ruin one of the most promising modern communication mediums: live streaming. Read More

With Twitter’s much more polished live-streaming app Periscope now on the market, Meerkat needs to strengthen its own social graph to keep users from straying to its new competitor. So today Meerkat for iOS was updated with recommendations of people to follow, a way to follow people from inside streams, and ways to discover streams your friends like. It’s also trying to neutralize… Read More

Facebook has made some breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Today at its F8 conference, CTO Mike Schroepfer described new systems for identifying the content and context of videos and sentences.
The second day of F8 included the open-sourcing of native mobile app development tool React Native, a preview of a giant new unmanned aerial vehicle for delivering Internet to remote areas… Read More

If American Idol was mobile-first, it’d be Chosen. Built by ex-CEO of Beats Music, Gracenote, and Mog David Hyman with $6.5 million in funding, Chosen launches the invite-only beta of its battle of the bands app today on iOS. But what’s special about Chosen is you don’t have to be a musician to play. The game puts you in the judge’s seat to record scathing (or… Read More

Hotels have sophisticated pricing engines to tell them how much their rooms should cost. Airbnb hosts don’t, or at least didn’t until Beyond Pricing. The startup’s tool plugs into your Airbnb listing, and uses signals about future demand to automatically reprice your room on the fly. Beyond Pricing will charge a 1% fee of people’s Airbnb rate, but can help hosts make 10%… Read More

F8 started with a family photo. But not of the Zuckerbergs. Of Facebook’s products. “Facebook used to be this one blue app on your phone, and now Facebook is a family of apps” said its CEO as he showed off the user counts of the different family members. Facebook Groups with 700 million. WhatsApp with 700 million. Messenger with 600 million. Instagram with 300 million. And… Read More

Y Combinator unveiled one of its most impressive startup batches to date yesterday, featuring big ideas in medicine, finance, and marketplaces. After carefully watching the demos, speaking with founders in the class, and querying prestigious investors about their favorites, TechCrunch has compiled this list of the top 10 startups of the 47 that launched at Winter 2015 YC Demo Day 2.
Here they… Read More

Today at its F8 conference, Facebook announced its new Messenger Platform that will allow its 600 million users to create and share content with third-party tools, and communicate directly with businesses rather than calling or emailing them. The content tools platform and apps from initial partners including ESPN, JibJab, and Giphy, will become in an Messenger update available today. Facebook… Read More

A notification just sent out by the official app for Facebook’s F8 conference later today reads “The Garage and Demo areas are now open! Just revealed: Parse for IoT, Messenger as a Platform, and the Teleportation Station.”
[Update: Facebook just launched its Messenger Platform. Learn what it does from our article here.]
The alert seen by Multiple people seems to indicate… Read More

Y Combinator got so big, it had to split its Demo Day in two. During today’s second wave we saw a variety of promising biotech, marketplace, enterprise, and financial tech startups. Yesterday we chronicled 50 consumer, B2B, developer, and hardware companies.
With bigger and bigger batches, the on-stage pitches are getting more bombastic as YC’s startups compete for attention. Yet… Read More

Facebook’s experimented with ways to surface old Memories since 2010. But after seeing Timehop hit 6 million daily users on mobile, Facebook is officially launching a competing nostalgia feature called “On This Day.” It shows users their Facebook posts from the current date in past years, like photos from exactly one year ago, or status updates from four years ago.
Rolling… Read More

Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends. Read More

Uber isn’t just Uber. It’s Google Maps, Checkr background checks, Braintree payments, and Twilio texts. The best way to do business isn’t to build it all in-house. Top companies are increasingly piecing together a composite of APIs from specialized startups. That lets them concentrate on their unique value-add rather than reinventing the wheel.
Now, those building blocks… Read More

When you chat with friends about settling debts or splitting the bill, Facebook doesn’t want you to have to open another app like PayPal or Venmo to send them money. So today it unveiled a new payments feature for Facebook Messenger that lets you connect your Visa or Mastercard debit card and tap a “$” button to send friends money on iOS, Android, and desktop with zero fees. Read More

“Because so many publishers build their businesses on banner ads, they have to get people back to their site to make money” says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. But that misses much of the value of social media. “You should be using this distribution channel to show them content, not just a pointer to some other space.”
During his talk to a massive SXSW crowd, Peretti… Read More

That’s the danger of building on someone else’s platform. You never know when they’ll pivot into your business and steamroll you. Last night, that happened to Meerkat.
The livestreaming app was built entirely on Twitter, piggybacking on it for identity, communication, and distribution. Yesterday morning, Twitter confirmed reports that it had acquired an unlaunched competing… Read More

Facebook today announced it has acquired personalized shopping search engine TheFind to help improve its commerce ads. TheFind had raised $26 million from Lightspeed and Redpoint since getting off the ground around 2005, but will now be shut down. Some, but not all, members of the team are joining Facebook. Read More